The present invention relates generally to analytical tools for facilitating decision making. More specifically, the present invention relates to methods and apparatus for building arguments to support a conclusion as to whether a particular situation is likely to have a negative or positive outcome.
The survival of an enterprise often rests upon its ability to make correct and timely decisions, despite the complexity and uncertainty of the environment. Understanding the world and facing the different alternatives it presents us is crucial in any effort.
Different studies and formalisms of argumentation have come out of different fields such as philosophy (Lorenzen and Lorenz 1977; Perelman (1970); Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca 1958; Toulmin 1958), decision analysis (Sycara 1990), and artificial intelligence (Dung 1995). These formalisms attempt to deal with the uncertainty inherently present in the world. Behind every decision, though, there is an argument supporting it, and arguments range from rhetorical explanations to mathematical proofs. Argumentation theory leverages problem solving under uncertainty by supporting qualitative and quantitative approaches.
Analysis, on the other hand, deals with the examination and separation of a complex situation, its elements, and its relationships. More often than not, the situation is full of unknowns, uncertainties, and deliberate misinformation. The analyst is confronted not only with the facts, but also with his or her knowledge about the facts and assumptions, others possible knowledge, the hypotheses that can be drawn from those facts, and the evidence supporting and contradicting those hypotheses (Heuer 1999).
Conventional analytic products are recorded as text, such as messages, Web pages, or documents. One drawback with these forms of recorded arguments is that they are time consuming to read and comprehend, slowing comparisons and explanations. Although text-processing tools help to streamline production of these products, they provide little or no support in guaranteeing that the arguments are comprehensive and easily understood. Many of the attempts made to introduce automation into the decision making process are based on decision theoretic constructs and tend to suffer from the same drawbacks:
These models reduce the analyst's role to that of data entry, making the models unpopular with analysts. Additionally, explanations given for the conclusions are often incomprehensible to analysts, since the lines of reasoning are explained in terms of conditional probabilities, making the conclusions hard to accept. Even if an analyst were to accept a role limited to data entry and come to believe the conclusions based on a history of success, the world would change, requiring that the analytic model be updated, which the analysts are unable to do. Because of these problems, the tools typically fall into disuse even when they had been initially successful. Because of the difficulty of employing formal methods, decision makers typically resort to informal methods, sacrificing structure and rigor.
Accordingly, it is desirable to provide a user-centric analytical tool that allows users of different levels of expertise to easily and efficiently engage in the process of argument creation and analysis.